Alex wrote:This one is something I found in another forum, but is worth asking anyway.

In a standup fight, using a Mk 2 Dahak and a Mk 2 and fully operational Death Star, which one would win?

Luck

Well the Death Star is always pictured as having reasonable hyper-speed but being slow and ponderous in normal space. Between enchanaac drive and something like 65-70% of lightspeed on gravitonics, I'm pretty sure Dahak could run rings around the Death Star.

Even if everything else was completely equal (which it wouldn't be of course) that would be enough for Dahak to win.

Add in a single "main weapon" of admittedly extreme power but that can only point in one direction at a time, vs the ability to spit out THOUSANDS of missiles of almost the same power in almost any direction, and I don't think the Death Star would last more than a few seconds at best.

Dahak is a warship, designed to go against and destroy other warships of her own (or equivalent) class, with anti-ship weapons and shields to stop opponent weapons.

Death Star is a moving fortress, designed as a terror weapon to destroy planets (ie stationary targets) if necessary with its one & only "main gun". Recall when the Death Stars fought the two rebel fleets, the primary offensive weapons were their "parasitic" fighters and/or accompanying fleet of warcraft. DS defenses were short-ranged, and seemed mostly anti-fighter. The DS is very much akin to a lightly armored vessel, with a very unique big gun that is only usable in limited circumstances.

Alex wrote:While there are no Jedi among the Imerpials, the bio upgrades more than compensate for this evolutionary oversight.

Personally I think that the DS is toast, but am interested to see if anybody feels otherwise.

Michael Everett wrote:I know Dahak doesn't appear in it, but this clip may be thought-provoking...

Yeah I've always thought those Star Trek vs Star Wars jokes to be hilarious. Nobody could possibly have a clue who would really win in such disparate tech environments, even if you actually had true and accurate (hah!) "tech specs" for every single weapon and shielding component in the various arsenals. With the exception that the Death Star could obviously take the Enterprise in a one-on-one fight, because there is no way the Enterprise could have enough shield power to resist a planet-cracking weapon, there isn't a single "hard" conclusion you can truly make, and anybody who wants to create one of these (admittedly extremely amusing) videos can come up with nearly any result he wants.

Still, when you talk about weapons capable of shattering a planet, you can at least come up with a reasonable estimate. Such weapons have to be in fairly similar ranges of power, unless you want to start assuming one fictional universe has much more dense planets than the other... which is ludicrous on the face of things, since we're talking about two universes supposedly inhabited by apparently standard humans with the same level of tolerance for gravity. If you do want to pretend that, it's pure handwavium and likely wishful-thinking bull crap. If you don't, then the general weapon power levels must be essentially very similar.

Now we know that even the original Dahak had "Mark 10" gravitonic weapons that were apparently almost exactly equivalent to the weapons used to shatter Sheskar IV into an asteroid belt (which, in time, is exactly what Alderaan became as well). Neither weapon is therefore some huge order of magnitude greater in power than the other. Oh the Death Star's superlaser is likely a good bit more focused at its actual strike point (though there's no way to actually prove so), but the raw amount of power involved has to be reasonably similar.

Yet at Kano, Dahak lurched "like a broken-masted galleon" despite taking at least two hits (likely more, given that at last count 20 missiles made it through the close-in defenses) from a later generation of gravitonic warhead than his own stocks... plus several antimatter warheads (which aren't exactly powerless in their own right) at essentially the same time. Even with less focus, I would be highly surprised if three or four of those gravitonic weapons were not at least as much raw energy as the Death Star's superlaser. Add in the other ~15 antimatter weapons and it would take some serious handwavium to pretend otherwise. Yet Dahak survived all of that firepower, with nothing more than some superficial surface damage.

Then you add in that Dahak is obviously much more maneuverable, much faster firing, and with much greater range, and the only way I could see the Death Star winning would be by firing first when Dahak wasn't expecting to be fired on. Now I suppose if such a situation occurred and the Death Star's super-laser actually got a shot off on the original Dahak it might succeed in blasting through the shields (because of point-focus) and destroying him or at least so heavily damaging him that the rest of the fight would no longer be a mismatch. Dahak II would likely shrug it off and proceed to kick the Darth Sideous' butt without even taking a scratch.

Michael Everett wrote:I know Dahak doesn't appear in it, but this clip may be thought-provoking...

Yeah I've always thought those Star Trek vs Star Wars jokes to be hilarious. Nobody could possibly have a clue who would really win in such disparate tech environments, even if you actually had true and accurate (hah!) "tech specs" for every single weapon and shielding component in the various arsenals. With the exception that the Death Star could obviously take the Enterprise in a one-on-one fight, because there is no way the Enterprise could have enough shield power to resist a planet-cracking weapon, there isn't a single "hard" conclusion you can truly make, and anybody who wants to create one of these (admittedly extremely amusing) videos can come up with nearly any result he wants.

Still, when you talk about weapons capable of shattering a planet, you can at least come up with a reasonable estimate. Such weapons have to be in fairly similar ranges of power, unless you want to start assuming one fictional universe has much more dense planets than the other... which is ludicrous on the face of things, since we're talking about two universes supposedly inhabited by apparently standard humans with the same level of tolerance for gravity. If you do want to pretend that, it's pure handwavium and likely wishful-thinking bull crap. If you don't, then the general weapon power levels must be essentially very similar.

Now we know that even the original Dahak had "Mark 10" gravitonic weapons that were apparently almost exactly equivalent to the weapons used to shatter Sheskar IV into an asteroid belt (which, in time, is exactly what Alderaan became as well). Neither weapon is therefore some huge order of magnitude greater in power than the other. Oh the Death Star's superlaser is likely a good bit more focused at its actual strike point (though there's no way to actually prove so), but the raw amount of power involved has to be reasonably similar.

Yet at Kano, Dahak lurched "like a broken-masted galleon" despite taking at least two hits (likely more, given that at last count 20 missiles made it through the close-in defenses) from a later generation of gravitonic warhead than his own stocks... plus several antimatter warheads (which aren't exactly powerless in their own right) at essentially the same time. Even with less focus, I would be highly surprised if three or four of those gravitonic weapons were not at least as much raw energy as the Death Star's superlaser. Add in the other ~15 antimatter weapons and it would take some serious handwavium to pretend otherwise. Yet Dahak survived all of that firepower, with nothing more than some superficial surface damage.

Then you add in that Dahak is obviously much more maneuverable, much faster firing, and with much greater range, and the only way I could see the Death Star winning would be by firing first when Dahak wasn't expecting to be fired on. Now I suppose if such a situation occurred and the Death Star's super-laser actually got a shot off on the original Dahak it might succeed in blasting through the shields (because of point-focus) and destroying him or at least so heavily damaging him that the rest of the fight would no longer be a mismatch. Dahak II would likely shrug it off and proceed to kick the Darth Sideous' butt without even taking a scratch.

The only issue I have is that gravitonic warheads aren't direct force weapons - they don't directly shove energy into a target until the target is dead. Same with Dahak's beam weapons - the Utu-class Dahak's beam weapons were stated to shatter molecular bonds; the weapons of the Asgerds and Trosans of the Empire were even more dangerous, shattering atomic bindings, inducing instant fission. Neither of those happen to be direct energy weapons along the lines of Star Wars weaponry.We also do not know how many Mark 10s were needed to shatter Sheskar IV, and at what range they were detonated.

Gravitonic warheads are said to essentially make a tiny black hole.Hyper missiles would ignore the Death Star shields, and could well pop up inside the Death Star's hull, and then generate their mini black holes ... crumpling it.

Dahak would basically need to be mission killed or absurdly crippled in order to not hand the Death Star its ass on a platter. One hyper missile launcher with gravitonic warheads on its missiles would suffice.The Death Star superlaser takes time to charge - and that's plenty of time for Dahak to not be in its effective firing arc and range and/or pour in enough fire to cripple the superlaser (it's a fairly obvious target). Or, y'know, if Dahak's really that close to the Death Star ... activation of his Echanach Drive would probably also work.

Given how long it takes for the DS to charge up, Dahak would destroy it with gravitonic missiles long before it could fire. The response times aren't even vaguely comparable, and the DS wasn't designed to combat targets of comparable scale, nor was it expected ever to meet anything that could really fight back!

Also, given how close it looks to Alderaan (and to Yavin IV when it prepares to fire) the range must be far less - yes, I know the original post asked about DSII, but we never saw it blow up a planet, so... Dahak can fire from dozens of light-minutes away, at which distance a planet would be only a point of light - no visible disk.

(EDIT: and I now see that Kytheros posted much of this while I was writing...)

If the DS somehow DID manage to fire, though, I'm not sure what would happen. Dahakverse shields clearly do block lasers (as the Achuultani use them), but I'm not sure if we've ever seen anything like that much firepower concentrated into one point against a planetoid's shields. They can stand up to millions of Achuultani antimatter warheads which are 10 GT each, at least for a while... but permanently blowing up an Earth-sized planet (at least, destroying it so thoroughly that it doesn't re-form later due to gravity) is on the order of *trillions of gigatons* (~2.2 x 10^32 joules, the equivalent of ~5.3 x 10^22 tons of TNT, for Earth).

Yes, Dahak's shields can survive gravitonic warheads, but those don't seem to destroy entirely via direct energy transfer but rather by somehow removing the target from the universe via black hole/wormhole (though the gravitational stresses around the core effect do seem to inflict more ordinary damage, as ships 'crumple' and such, and the annihilation of Iapetus causes gravity stresses that cause earthquakes on Earth). If the shield prevents the black hole from forming within the protected area, I'm not sure this is really comparable - the actual energy it has to deal with may be far smaller than a planet-killer laser.